The big international news of the week has obviously been the Iranian elections and what, from the western point of view appears as a rigged victory for President Ahmadinejad.

Of course, all the videos and Twitter "tweets" seem to verify the brutality of the Iranian regimes crackdown on those yearning for change from the pariah role Ahmadinejad seems content allowing Iran to play indefinitely.

This may well be absolutely the core of what is happening.  It is possible we are seeing a revolution in the making, but I doubt it.

Not only was Ahmadinejad's opponent not all that substantively different on the policy areas of most concern the United States, there is some reason to question whether the voting fraud that has been alledged is as rampant as advertised.

Again, it could be.  Given the closed nature of the system, the reality is that America has no good way to know for sure.

However, I was struck by the following analysis by Stratfor and wondered if the desire for revolution in Iran is more a projection of our hopes for Iran rather than their hope for themselves.  Sure, there may be thousands upon thousands of those disaffected by the outcome, but is there a "silent majority" that is not? 

In the 1960s you would have thought America was nothing but left-wing antiwar protestors as did many on the outisde at the time looking in.   Yet Richard Nixon engineered victories by piecing together those that did not agree with the radicalism of the protest movement.

Is this what Ahmadinejad has done in Iran?

From Stratfor:

"Ahmadinejad’s Popularity

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression."
 
Let's see what happens if there are recounts and where the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini eventually (and finally) comes down.  Perhaps, the west is correct in its views, but the troubling question not yet fully answered is- what if we were wrong?